Thursday, March 21, 2013

A Perfectly Reasonable Morning Rant From Academic Charlotte Anne.

Yo, Annie.Loving the new blend!

OK mother fuckers. This is IT.

WHO FUCKED WITH MY COFFEE???!!! I am sure the two cans LOOKED the same to you. But they are NOT the same so WHY THE FUCK did you dump one can into the other??? One can is crappy tasting (but I keep it around in case we run out, as bad coffee is often better than no coffee) the other can is the good-tasting nearly full one that I use every day to make the coffee.

You may think “what’s the big deal, honest mistake.”

Except for the fact that I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO BUYS THE COFFEE. I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO MAKES THE COFFEE. I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO CLEANS THE COFFEE POT.

Since NOBODY else seems to be able to handle such difficult tasks NOBODY should touch the coffee.

There's an easy fix to this. If you're the only one that buys, makes, and cleans up after the coffee, you should be the only one to drink the coffee. Move everything out of the department office and into your office.

Keep your own coffee pot and personal stash in your office. There are really cute coffee makers that are small, one cup versions. The coffee maker in the break room will gather cobwebs and everyone will wonder where the eternal coffee went.

A good cup of coffee is just that, a good cup of coffee. A bad cup of coffee, a truly terrible brew, forces you to relive the experience of every good cup of coffee you've ever had in order to cope with the taste of what is in your mouth right then. In other words, when drinking a good cup of coffee you're drinking just the one good cup. When you drink a bad cup of coffee, though, you re-drink every good cup of your life.

I doubt your coffee-mixer had that in mind, but I'm looking for a charitable explanation.

In the department I used to teach in, people tended to be petty and were all too willing to take offence at the slightest thing.

An act like what was described would, at best, be seen as a simple mistake and treated accordingly and likely nothing would happen. However, to some of my colleagues, it would have been seen as a declaration of war, leading to an endless cycle of tit-for-tat actions, such as deliberately misplacing supplies that someone needed and so on.

I often wondered if I was working in an institution for adult education or simply a daycare centre for grown-ups.

We used to have a department coffee maker that our secretary maintained. Our department head often proclaimed that chatting around the coffee pot seemed to be the happiest part of some professors' day. It was the first thing cut when the budget got tight.

I feel your pain. Here in Public Secondary Level Hell, I once had my own little maker in my room for this very reason. The Fire Marshal confiscated it. I did not get it back.

And here's another level of insult: I belong to the only department on campus that must share its lavs with all visitors and the general public. That means the personal hygiene effects we stash in "our" ladies' room are consumed at an interesting rate. Yes, despite there being a machine on the wall that still takes a slim DIME for a good variety of options. Oh, and that's the merest tip: our colleagues--you know, those guys and gals from those other departments that HAVE their own, exclusive-to-their-own-use facilities?--they come up HERE, to OUR domain when Mother Nature rings doorbell number two. That's right. Yup. We have discussed as a department how we should answer this behavior. My greatest urge--regularly--is to visit each department, one each day, walk in to the secured and tucked-away space, and quiet any alarm with the disclaimer, "No, no! No worries! I just came by to take a crap!" and then proceed to deliver upon my promise.

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What Is This?

College Misery is a dysfunctional group blog where professors get the chance to release some of the frustration that builds up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.